Friday Bytes: Zayo, GTT, Orange, LINX

TGIF, and may the ice and snow melt in the Northeastern US over the weekend - it's time for some springtime.

Zayo's weekly unnamed customer contract announcement comes from the infrastructure-as-a-service side of things. Zayo has been selected by an IaaS provider for a combination of space and power in Denver, Chicago, and Atlanta, wavelengths to hook up the locations, and dedicated IP transit as well. It's all on-net for Zayo, adding justification to past organic buildouts. The IaaS provider is moving out of other people's clouds and into infrastructure it controls directly.

Fresh off its acquisition of Hibernia Networks, GTT is formally taking aim at the transport layer. They have launched optical transport services, leveraging DWDM on the acquired fiber footprint to offer waves and low latency services. The core fiber assets there are of course the company's three transatlantic cables, especially the new Express cable system with its 59ms connectivity between New York City and London.

Orange Business Services is adding more hybrid network capabilities. They are adding SD-WAN technology from Riverbed, and the two companies will team up on a virtual network function to deploy on uCPE at the customer site. The first pilot customers will be hooked up next quarter, adn the VNF should be ready by the end of the year if all things go well.

And the London Internet Exchange is upgrading its data center interconnect infrastructure. They are deploying Ciena's DCI platform throughout their London footprint, which spans 11 PoPs. The upgrade will enable them to keep up with demand while lowering costs and accelerating the turn up of connections.